Guest Post: Planning with J. Ross

Today's guest post is from indie author J. Ross, who wants to give us some insight into planning a story.

Have you ever tried writing while having a full time job? If you haven’t, let me be the first to tell you that it is one of the hardest things that you can ever do.

This is my second year teaching elementary school, and to call the job demanding would be an understatement. Grading papers, writing lesson plans, filling out paperwork, meetings before, during, and after school all take most of your time and energy; and I haven’t even mentioned the time it takes to answer all of the emails and texts from parents! One of the biggest blessings, however, is that I am the Reading/English Language Arts teacher. Which means that my focus is on teaching the writing skills that I use in my (for the moment) side gig as a novelist.

I loved teaching my fifth graders my favorite part of the writing process: the planning process. As I taught, I was hit by the realization that if I want writing to be my full-time job I needed to really put some time and effort into the planning process. The book that I published over the summer, General Leila, is one that I actually wrote in 2009. For that book, as well as much of my writing since then, I’d relied largely on the “write when you’re inspired” model of writing. I realized, as an adult with a full time job, I’d need a more structured approach to writing in order to spend what little time I do have to write productively.

Teaching my fifth graders last year really allowed me to see how important having a plan was. Especially considering that I usually have a million story fragments and ideas floating around in my heads. Actually seeing the words on the page helps to make sure I focus on the one story that I’m working on. I had my students start with several ideas, then choose one idea to work on, and from there,create a plan of action. Since my students were only writing short stories, a five-paragraph essay format was a good enough plan for them.

With that thought in mind, my first step was to decide how I was going to do my plan. Was I going to write out a detailed chapter outline? Write bullet points? Do character sketches? Was I going to put all of this into a separate document on my computer?

After some consideration, I decided to use a hybrid method. I basically wrote out an outline of the story on paper, with blurbs of the major plot events.

This way, I was able to cross off what was done, as well as add details or new plot points as I needed them. Mapping out the plot like this allowed me to quickly see holes that needed filling or if certain characters needed more fleshing out. Having the paper beside me as I write also makes it easier than clicking back and forth between documents on my computer.

One of the things that I had to help my students with was actually using the outline to figure out what was important to add in the story. They always wanted to just jump into writing, which invariably ended up with them writing a disjointed story rather than an outline. Forcing them to slow down and really plan made a huge difference in their drafts.

By the same token, I had just been inspired with a new story when I decided to use this process, so I was anxious to start writing. But I forced myself to slow down and really focus on having a solid plan for what I was going to write. I wrote character names, background information, specific details, all in a rough plot map.
It definitely paid off.

Using this method, I wrote 20,000 words in about two weeks, something I had never done before. Normally I had to wait on sudden bursts of inspiration to write three or four pages, and then I might struggle for weeks to continue. I was extremely excited, and I can’t wait to see where else this story will go!

Now that the first two weeks of school are over, and both myself and the students have adjusted to the new school schedule, I’m going to pick up my computer and my notepad and get back to work. With my plan in hand, I’m confident that I’ll have another book ready to go in the next year or so!

If you’d like to find out more about me and my work, feel free to find me on Facebook! My novel GENERAL LEILA is available on Amazon and CreateSpace.com.